Stack Overflow reducing headcount by 20% - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/AndrewBrobston/status/926141946015420416 <comment><USER2> It's undeniable that their main developer Q&A site is a really great thing that saved me many hours of work. However, it was somewhat hostile to its more export users from the very beginning: the reputation system favors quickfire replies to grab the first upvotes, and they seem to put a strong emphasis on "cookbook" answers where many of the more nuanced discussions were closed as "opinion based". I think there are some missed opportunities here to make the Q&A site even more useful.

However, perhaps that wasn't their focus. My impression is the Q&A site was supposed to be mostly a gateway to their other services, and for that to work, the Q&A part simply had to be "good enough". It's an interesting strategy that perhaps didn't work out quite the way they had hoped it would.

<comment><USER3> I couldn't agree less. First off, they're not going out of business, just letting 20% go and one would assume refocusing. I think the site is set up to get good answers and not just the first upvotes as answers stick around and users can vote answers up or down as they see fit. The first answers on older questions tend to be very long and in-depth and give a lot of good information about the pros and cons of the approach they discuss. (If you want something _really_ in-depth, check out [https://codereview.stackexchange.com/.](https://codereview.stackexchange.com/.)) The ones that get closed as opinion based are almost entirely asking for software recommendations or the like. I've rarely seen an objectively answerable question closed as being opinion-based.

<comment><USER2> For many of the supposedly "opinion-based" questions, reasonable people will at least agree on the relevant trade-offs, even if they come to different conclusions overall. Thus, when a question asks about "pros and cons of technology X", expert insight into the trade-offs involved could be really useful to help evaluate your own specific situation. But that kind of more nuanced question doesn't really fit the simple "one correct answer" model that Stack Overflow seems to be going for and is thus very likely to be closed. IMHO, there should be a distinction between "it depends on the circumstances, and here's why" and "purely opinion based", and Stack Overflow would be more useful for me personally if the former were allowed.

Edit: Just to check if moderation policies have changed since I last looked, I did a quick search for questions containing the phrase "pros and cons". As unfortunately expected, practically all of the questions are closed: [https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=pros+and+cons](https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=pros+and+cons)

<comment><USER4> While "it depends on the circumstances and here's why" is the ideal answer, such questions rarely get those answers.

On one of the sister sites to SO, there's a post about pros and cons on their meta - [https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions...](https://softwareengineering.meta.stackexchange.com/questions/6758/) \- such questions are often a moderation headache when you get the inevitable spam and the poor quality answers of "I can't believe anyone didn't mention XYZ".

Look at [https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15142/what-are-the- pros-...](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/15142/what-are-the-pros-and- cons-to-keeping-sql-in-stored-procs-versus-code) and start reading through and consider the one that starts out with "@Keith" responding to a different answer or "A SQL stored proc doesn't increase the performance of the query" being the entirety of the answer.

Such questions, when left open can get awful answers that are difficult to clean up.

Have you considered that there are sites with as laser like of a focus on pros and cons as SO maintains on Q&A? [https://www.slant.co](https://www.slant.co) is one such site. [https://www.slant.co/topics/607/~best-java- ides](https://www.slant.co/topics/607/~best-java-ides) [https://www.slant.co/topics/440/~best-nosql-databases-for- we...](https://www.slant.co/topics/440/~best-nosql-databases-for-web- applications) and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Why would you fire people on such a short notice? No need to hand over things? No interest in providing at least some time to look for a new job?

EDIT: To clarify that a bit, I am interested in what the upsides are except for possibly saving some money. An orderly shutdown usually seems preferable to me over quickly killing the process, for both sides.

<comment><USER6> Depends on country too. In EU our work laws regulate how your employee may be laid off. My country (poland) says that employee has to be notified about termination:

\- week ahead if he or she was employed for less than month \- month ahead if he or she was employed for less than three years \- three months ahead if he or she was employed for more than three years

This goes both ways however, as employee has to notify his employeer on same basis that he or she quits. This introduces amount of games to recruitment process, where company frequently not only has to make bet by deciding to hire somebody, but also make sure that they'll wont be outbid during the three months that have to pass for person to change employeer

<comment><USER7> I'm quite surprised to hear one must give their employer notice. Doesn't Poland or the EU have laws against forced labor? In the US, for example, all employment by private corporations is "at will."

Anyone can quit at a moments notice, for any or no reason at all. For the sake of one's colleagues and reputation it is widely considered good practice to give no less than 2 weeks notice, though this is merely custom.

<comment><USER8> It's not "forced labour", it's just a contractual term. You certainly _can_ quit on zero notice but you've breached contract and it will cost you.

If you look closely at US startups you'll usually find the founders and senior staff are on "notice required" contracts of several months.

<comment><USER9> If you make the breach cost infinitely high, how is that not a modern form of slavery?

<comment><USER8> It's not infinitely high? In practice the worst it's likely to be is "actual damages" \- costs directly incurred by you quitting. [http://employeradvice.org.uk/what-to-do-when-staff-quit- with...](http://employeradvice.org.uk/what-to-do-when-staff-quit-without- notice/)

Modern slavery is things like confiscating the passports of your immigrant workers so they can't escape.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I tried to hire through them recently. It was a joke of a process. More like the way uaed cars are sold. Don't contact us, we'll contact you. No price displayed, we negotiate that depending on how much you can afford. The sign up system simply didn't work, saying I had already signed up but then the next button simply didn't work. They did get back to me a week later. This completely change my view. I went from wanting to use them to advertise for people to work here with like minds to a detractor.

<comment><USER11> Indeed is doing a good job at hiring in the tech field. Their Prime product is great (if you live in one of the cities they are running it in).

(Disclaimer: I work @ Indeed, but I've seen friends quickly hired using Prime.)

<comment><USER12> It took me a while to understand that by "Indeed" you refer to the company.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Surprised no one has mentioned StackOverflow Docs, which was recently shut down as a failure. I unfortunately panned it at launch but it seems they devoted significant resources to the dead product.

StackOverflow Sunsetting Documentation:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14917765](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14917765)

Why I think they targeted the wrong market:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12399438](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12399438)

tl;dr:

\- it doesn't make sense to donate open-source docs to an offsite corporate service that might shut down

\- also, the very common complaint that SO has poor moderation, groupthink doesn't work for docs like it does for one-topic answers

</comment><comment><USER14> I remember reaching out to them a bunch of years ago (2012 or so) in order to ask them to host a stack overflow sub-site for our product (from a sizeable company). We were willing to pay quite a lot (because they had the premier UX for this kind of thing), but they weren't at all interested. They just told us to try to grow things "organically", because they had decided to focus 100% on open stuff.

We weren't really interested in their google juice, all we wanted was their actual functionality. Some non-stackoverflow domain would have been fine.

It just seemed like a missed opportunity on their end. I don't think we were the only company asking for this kind of service...

<comment><USER15> If I understand correctly, they offer this now, your private instance for your own product(s) & team(s):

[https://www.stackoverflowbusiness.com/enterprise](https://www.stackoverflowbusiness.com/enterprise)

Edit: while interesting, this (private internal instance for your team) is not what johansch is after (separate public instance dedicated to your product, for your users)

<comment><USER14> (Edit) This appears to be for non-public stuff only, though. So an internal stackoverflow.

Still no solution for a company wanting to host a public stackoverflow instance for some product.

<comment><USER15> Ah, yes, right, sorry. I understand now what you were after. Agree there would have been (is?) an interesting potential there too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's been interesting watching SO try to monetize.

I wonder: How would people feel if they went the Wikipedia way? It's obviously a very beneficial site, but not as widely applicable as Wikipedia. I personally prefer the Wikipedia model of being ad-free and having no additional product and doing a fundraising drive every so often. PBS as well.

That said, I certainly think given the audience of SO that there are several opportunities for them, so it'll be interesting to see what works.

<comment><USER17> I remember seeing an article here these past few weeks talking about the business model of Wikipedia and how it's supposedly inherently flawed. Wikipedia doesn't bring in a lot of cash, but it rather sets a sad tone for itself how unfortunate that may seem.

Personally I'd be more interested in seeing StackOverflow branch out. What have they done these past few years? It seems like StackOverflow has remained stagnant, yet they have so much potential.

<comment><USER18> They've done a lot, but apparently it hasn't been particularly successful. Their new "Documentation" platform didn't really ever gain traction: [https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting-d...](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/354217/sunsetting- documentation)

<comment><USER19> I don't think I ever saw a Documentation page in a search result. Instead, I saw (and see) dozens of copies of the same SO Q&A content spread across multiple sites. I wonder if they would have had better success if they adjusted their SEO strategies and went after the rehosting sites (more?) aggressively.

<comment><USER4> Google was never pointed at Documentation, so you wouldn't find it there. There were constant concerns within the meta SO community about the quality of the content and how embarrassing it would be (not a small fraction of it was worse than W3Schools of old - [https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/334638/](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/334638/) ). It could have been rather damaging to the SO brand to have such poor material shown as examples of what is desired.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Very sorry to hear SO is financially in trouble. Also sorry for the people who lost their jobs. SO offers a valuable service. Sad to hear they can't monetize enough.

Edit: Reminds me of the situation of SoundCloud (company offering a service loved by their consumers, still can't monetize enough to satisfy investors, let alone cover the costs (huge headcount))

</comment><comment><USER21> How many people work at StackOverflow?

Seeing this post also made me realize I have no clue how the company makes money.

<comment><USER22> I'm sure they make TONS of money from ad revenue. Probably they tried to generate other revenue streams but it just didn't work out and hence the layoff.

Here's a crazy idea: what if Stackoverflow developed a search engine for developers? Usually I get to Stackoverflow posts through Google but perhaps Stackoverflow can provide a better experience by doing code specific web crawling.

<comment> brian-armstrong Inherent conflict here - programmers don't click on ads, fullstop. I can't imagine a group I'd want to advertise to less.

<comment><USER23> Do you have any numbers or references on that claim?

<comment><USER24> So, I don't have a formal study saying that techies are the most likely to ad- block/least likely to click ads. What we know:

\- Ad-blocker users skew young and wealthy.[1] The developer community as a whole also skews young and wealthy.

\- If you are aware of the existence of ad-blocking technology, you probably use it.[2]

\- Via comparison with other sites, you can also make some extrapolations. Take IGN - not a perfect proxy, but a reasonable one, with a core audience that is probably fairly demographically similar to the core audience for most developer-oriented sites. Approximately 40% of their traffic was using ad- blockers in 2015.[3] A Wired statement posted in 2016 has 20% of their traffic using ad-blockers.[4]

\- Anecdotal evidence: every dev I've worked with has at least one ad-blocker installed. The vast majority of dev-adjacent people I've worked with - PMs, technical writers, designers - have ad-blockers installed.

Put it together and I think it makes a fairly compelling case that techies are the last audience on earth you'd want to orient your online marketing towards. I used to hope that something like The Deck[5], which was explicitly targeted towards "web, design & creative professionals", would be a good solution to this, and I even permitted their ads on Metafilter, but they shut down last year, presumably because they just weren't making enough money. They did everything that people claimed they wanted: the ads were unobtrusive, mostly text and optimized images, they didn't engage in tracking, they didn't sell user data (as far as I know), and they still couldn't make it work.

1\. [https://marketingland.com/ad-blocker-usage-highest-among- key...](https://marketingland.com/ad-blocker-usage-highest-among-key- advertiser-demos-snake) people-and-high-earners-143546

2\. [https://digiday.com/media/survey-80-percent-know-ad- blocking...](https://digiday.com/media/survey-80-percent-know-ad-blocking- use/)

3\. [http://adage.com/article/digital/websites-hit-hardest-ad- blo...](http://adage.com/article/digital/websites-hit-hardest-ad- blockers/301767/)

4\. [https://www.wired.com/how-wired-is-going-to-handle-ad- blocki...](https://www.wired.com/how-wired-is-going-to-handle-ad-blocking/)

5\. [http://decknetwork.net/](http://decknetwork.net/)

<comment><USER25> People can claim all they want about wanting The Deck sort of stuff. But at the end of the day, those ads are still blocked most of the time. Possibly out of laziness to completely whitelist it, but the end result is the same. The ads are blocked like any other. I don't feel as optimistic that people blocking ads even want The Deck sort of ads. But without a study I'm okay not being sure.

<comment><USER24> Yeah, that's what I was trying to get across. I think the revealed preferences of most people using adblockers is that, while they say they would be ok with unobtrusive ads, they really don't want any ads at all. And to be honest, that's not a ludicrous view, because I've found that even on sites that have ostensibly "unobtrusive ads", all it takes is one bad actor and one slip-up in the ad network's verification process and unobtrusive ads become obtrusive and/or start invading your privacy. But we're going to have to find some other way to pay for content at some point.

Also, thanks for fixing that link.

<comment><USER25> Maybe, but a lot of sites only use Carbon/Deck or Adsense and some of those click bait native ad networks. I'm not sure if any of the click bait native ad networks have ever done too much with the issues you listed. I personally believe it's a bit too privileged to say no to Adsense like ads and native ads. You're likely to ever get a virus from them. At worst they are mildly annoying. That's all.

I find the one bad actor excuse to be just that. Another rationale or excuse.

So yeah I think the people just don't want any ads at all. Just like if I showed people how to block Spotify ads on their desktop and on how to do it on rooted android or iPhones, many people would stop paying Spotify. I don't tell my friends about these things for moral reasons, but it's just adding on to the point. People by and large will go with what's convenient. A simple app that can block Spotify ads will do for them. While jailbreaking would be too inconvenient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Of all questions I've asked on Stack Overflow, 50% were eventually answered by myself (and some became pretty popular after that) and 5% was answered by someone else. 45% is still open.

Good to see them back to a focus. I guess hiring could be a good cash cow but all of the sub communities are a bit much.

<comment><USER27> Your first paragraph says more about you than about the site.

<comment><USER28> It's a bit of a humblebrag... but I think he's TRYING to say that meaningful StackOverflow activity seems to have stagnated in recent years, and he hopes to see an uptick.

<comment><USER29> It could also be the "normal" stuff has been asked many times over and he might be into a very niche/obscure topic.

I have a question that I was my own answer on. It was pretty obscure (pageant/cygwin specific) and when I finally found the answer I cited the 2 sources I used hoping it would save others time in the future with an easier google than what I went through

<comment><USER26> Right. Can't count the hours stack overflow saved for me although I'm disappointed by the lack of response.

The most popular answers and questions tend to be new things in popular SDK's. The unanswered things are deeper problems in existing API's. You either get an answer in a very short term by multiple people or nothing at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I feel SO must really be run as a non-profit like wikipedia.

</comment><comment><USER31> I think an interesting path for stackoverflow would be to provide live channels for technology support and conversation. A bit like public slacks.

I remember a few technologies that officially said something like "support is provided through custom stackoverflow tags", but it didn't bring more functionalities.

A company trying to launch its new technology (i can imagine asp.net core for example) could have an associated community channel to talk about it, with automatic links from tags. That would be a nice addition.

<comment><USER32> Do you mean something like [https://chat.stackoverflow.com/](https://chat.stackoverflow.com/)

<comment><USER31> I was hoping nobody would point me to something like that :D So either my idea sucks, or they didn't do a good job advertising the feature...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Good. In the past year they have become very preachy about exact which political opinions the tech community is allowed to have, and how they are to express them.

My limit was the "Time to take a stand incident" when Joel effectively dictated that the developer community of StackOverflow must agree with the statement.

> Carving up the world into ... nations ... is both morally repugnant and > frankly stupid

The follow up of mods keeping the post open, backing it up and enforcing that idea on other questions really hammered home the idea that StackOverflow belongs to them, regardless of whatever they might say.

There was no room for nuance, just an American-centric political orthodoxy you must follow or aren't welcome.

[1][https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342440/time-to- take...](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/342440/time-to-take-a- stand/342608#342608)

<comment><USER34> Whatever your political views, the ellipses in the quote are deeply misleading, and in fact make his quote seem to say something Joel emphatically did not say.

Here is the full quote:

>It's impossible not to see the parallel: the only way to build a successful world today is to allow the contributions of everyone. Carving up the world into us vs. them, building walls, and demonizing religions, nations, and refugees is both morally repugnant and counterproductive, and it goes so much against the spirit of Stack Overflow that as a community we must speak out.

<comment><USER33> That doesn't make it better in my opinion. The politics of nations, strong border controls and vetting for refugees are nuanced there are pros and cons to all angles in that debate.

Whereas, Joel dictated that if you supported "carving up the world" you were against the sprit of Stack Overflow, no matter how that might impact you as a non-American.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> If SO and its related network sites die, what's going to happen to the millions of questions and answers their users contributed?

Is anyone archiving them and making the archives available in any useful way?

<comment><USER36> I don't know, but you guys remember the dark times before SO?...omg.

<comment><USER35> Now let's see.. we had Usenet news groups, mailing lists, IRC channels, and eventually web forums on every programming language, operating system, and software package under the sun. You could ask questions and get them answered. What was so cringeworthy about this exactly?

That's not to say that SO doesn't bring value. It has nice tagging and discoverability through search engines, good moderation, and an achievement and reputation system that encourages people to make quality contributions. But the days before it existed weren't so dark.

<comment><USER37> There was something called experts exchange. Remember that? It was horrible.

<comment><USER38> Funny you brought that up. I think it was Jeff Atwood who joked about how the domain name read like Expert-Sex-change

StackOverflow was such a welcome relief to this site and Atwood also wrote about expertsexchange in a blog post.

> I never appreciated how easy Experts-Exchange makes it for us. They are > almost universally loathed. We don't just have a rival, we have a larger > than life moustache-twirling, cape-wearing villain to contrast ourselves > with.

Source: [ 2009 ] [https://blog.codinghorror.com/whos-your-arch- enemy/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/whos-your-arch-enemy/)

<comment><USER39> i remember that expert-sex-change was blocked by our schools filter. thinking about it triggers a vague angry feeling, no specific reason other than, possibly, often repeated disappointment the answer wasn't readable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'll hasard a guess as to why it happened:

-The failure of the documentation (which failed for various reasons)

-VCs who want their return on their precious dollars.

</comment><comment><USER41> Given some of the pettiness of my interactions with their mods, I kind of felt they might be a bit overstaffed alright ...

</comment><comment><USER42> No notice? That seems a bit weird, no?

</comment><comment><USER43> Why?

</comment><comment><USER44> (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

So sorry to hear this. My thoughts to everyone, it is a very difficult day.

</comment><comment><USER45> I would advise people to stop comparing US workers rights to their countries. Just because you think your country gives you extra leverage and protection it does not mean it is a universally applicable law

<comment><USER46> Compared to the rest of the developed world, the U.S. does have very poor working conditions. I'd also say a majority of U.S. workers doesn't have a clue and has little experience to make a comparison anyhow.

I actually like people outside my country reminding my fellow citizens that we _do_ have it pretty bad and it _is_ in our power to change it if we decide to do that one day. The message might eventually soak in after some decades have passed.</comment></comment>


Swatting at a Swarm of Public Relations Spam - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/your-money/swatting-at-a-swarm-of-public-relations-spam.html#!

<comment><USER2> Sounds like this may be the inevitable devolvement of "The Suit is Back!" type of press hits.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> I've read the article, though it didn't come to mind when a business partner showed up in full coat and tie. He just said, "I'm dressing up again because I don't have to."

The suit is back! :-)</comment></comment>


Epic books you may finally have time to read now - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/10/entertainment/epic-books-coronavirus-reading/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> Posted mainly to say, FFS: Stephenson, _Baroque Cycle_

Plowed through the whole thing on a 4" iPhone, which got a chuckle from Neal himself at Kepler's a while back. The trick is to shut off the progress display and just let it roll like a river. 3000 easy pages plus another 1000 for _Cryptonomicon_.

eta: Right, probably more like 30,000 on that postage stamp.</comment>


Fairylog: A Racket language aiming to be like Verilog - <AUTHOR> http://pinksquirrellabs.com/blog/2019/04/17/fairylog/ <comment><USER2> Both Verilog and VHDL are a poor fit for chip design. This is why there are so many projects of higher-level hardware description languages. Chisel[1] looks to me as the best one. What I particularly like - they created an intermediate language FIRRTL[2], which might become an LLVM of hardware design. While the exact syntax might be opinionated and we need different options, the fewer wheels reinvented - the better. So at some point, it is important to create the low-level framework, on top of which many different languages can be built. You can read discussion about this particular idea here[3].

[1] [https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu/](https://chisel.eecs.berkeley.edu/)

[2] [https://bar.eecs.berkeley.edu/projects/firrtl.html](https://bar.eecs.berkeley.edu/projects/firrtl.html)

[3] [https://github.com/SymbiFlow/ideas/issues/19](https://github.com/SymbiFlow/ideas/issues/19)

</comment><comment><USER3> I prefer vhdlisp[0] tbh, but I prefer vhdl over verilog anyway.

[0] [https://github.com/domus123/vhdlisp](https://github.com/domus123/vhdlisp)

</comment><comment><USER4> Isn't there a Python based dialect for that already ? I think it was named cirrus but I can't find any link to it.

Anyway, it seems to be it would be better to make a lib for this than a whole language.

<comment><USER5> > Anyway, it seems to me it would be better to make a lib for this than a > whole language.

This is a Racket library. The whole point of Racket is that you can make a language as a library.

<comment><USER4> I am a strong opponent to most DSL. They usually make life harder, not easier, and a regular lib is most of the time a better choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm not sure I see the point, it turns a language that looks a lot like verilog but with lots more parentheses into verilog - why not just write verilog in the first place?

<comment><USER5> It's Verilog with Racket macro! That sounds much better than Verilog with custom macro system cobbled with Perl, which is what is used in practice.

<comment><USER7> Perl? A real comment I've seen in demo code from a vendor:

      always @(X) begin // add code from "PRBS_Calculator.xls" here...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems that it has been done, because it is possible for the scope that exists so far. However, there are a lot of obstacles on the way forward...

I have a lot of experience in writing Verilog for ASICs and I also have significant experience in software design. On top of this I have played with similar ideas in past and implemented all kinds of stuff related to this.

The bottom line is that it is very difficult to get this to scale. When you develop RTL, you have to be able to simulate it. There is no simulator (yet).

Using Racket as code generator is OK, but then there should be proper error checking for RTL semantics. This would be easier to achieve with just parsing any LISP style RTL (invent your own syntax) and generate Verilog out of that. That kind of parsing and checking can be done in Racket or C (or whatever language you prefer). Verilog95 is quite redundant in syntax, but the later Verilog versions and SystemVerilog are very sensible. There is actually very little you can gain by adding one layer of complexity on top of Verilog. If we assume that you could somehow rise the abstraction level significantly from Verilog, then the problem would become: how to annotate Verilog errors back to the "high" level Racket. The semantic gap is now too large. You loose controllability.

It is possible to do the simulator with Racket as well. The performance of such a simulator will be poor (yes, I have done simulators as well). Since the late 1990s RTL simulation has be done with "native compilation". The original implementation was interpreting, which is good when fast simulator start is preferred. However, when you run long simulations, you really need to break RTL into peaces and map everything straight to CPU instruction set. If you wanted to have fast RTL simulation, you would have to be able to explicitly control certain aspects. First of all you should be able to manipulate low level data effectively. It's reasonable in C with bit shifting and masking. Not so much in Racket, although it uses JIT, so it's probably not hopeless. HW is fixed in nature. All resources in your RTL model are going to exist for the duration of the whole simulation. In C you can allocate everything in nice order and you will gain good CPU cache behavior in your simulation. In Racket you have GC (garbage collection) and random placement of data in memory. The cache utilization will be poor, and the simulation would be 100x slower. Even if you keep references to all data in Racket all the time, the GC has to check for whether this data should be garbage collected or not. Most data is HW and it is static, so this is all redundant. Also there would be so much more data in Racket than in C implementation.

Then there is the issue of concurrency. HW is parallel and SW is serial. SW must model the parallel nature in simulation. There are maybe 10000M transistors in modern CPUs. That translates (very very roughly) to 100M flip- flops. In SW terms you have 100M (minimum, in practice more) threads. Not possible as OS threads, so you can do Green Threads to cover that number, but performance is useless. In the end you have to do it "manually" by using functions and modeling concurrency on data level. For each flip-flop you maintain new-input-value and update current-output-value when HW clock ticks. This is the basic method for RTL level simulation. Netlist simulation is much more detailed and hence much slower. RTL simulation has some more complications, but it's not that far from what is said above.

Ok, hobby projects does not have 10000M transistors, but they have to be debugged. You can use "printf" debugging with HW as well, but at some point you need waves. Waves display bit level values on a timeline. Time is essential since HW is parallel. You can get to waves with Racket, but you have to instrument each data point that you want visible with value dumping features. Again, it is possible with metaprogramming, but it really makes your head hurt and simulation slooooooowww.

With all that said, best of luck going forward. :)</comment>


The Lever Tech Stack - <AUTHOR> https://fulcrum.lever.co/the-lever-tech-stack-1b30e27d2bb0 <comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, Eric for writing this fantastic overview! It covers why we have made some key technology choices, both building off well established technologies such as Node.js, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, Redis, and AWS as well as some areas in which we've made outside of the box choices. It's been a fun adventure!

I think that this particular and special combination of leveraging open source and finding ways we can innovate technically makes being an engineer at Lever a fun and exciting challenge. I also think it comes through in our product, which stands out in a software category with many choices, but few of them innovative.</comment>


Know How To Roll Your SSL Certificates - <AUTHOR> https://www.petekeen.net/know-how-to-roll-your-ssl-certificates

<comment><USER2> "There's not much you can do to protect yourself against a service provider's certificate expiring,"

Well if you're a large bank or a heavyweight payment processor where an outage means lost $$$$ and not only $, you could easily have a few SSL certs from various root certs ready and roll one of them out once the sh*t hits the fan.

<comment><USER3> 1) monitor the complete certificate chain

2) indeed have a backup certificate ready (might be non EV), this is especially a must if you use HSTS [1] (which you should use BTW) it is actually a (low priority) government recommendation (B5-6) in The Netherlands [2], but that might have something to do with the government heavily using DigiNotar which got compromised and had it root certificates revoked by Microsoft which caused some communication issues..

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Strict_Transport_Security](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Strict_Transport_Security)

[2] [https://www.ncsc.nl/binaries/nl/dienstverlening/expertise- ad...](https://www.ncsc.nl/binaries/nl/dienstverlening/expertise- advies/kennisdeling/whitepapers/ict-beveiligingsrichtlijnen-voor- webapplicaties/1/ICT%2Bbeveiligingsrichtlijnen%2Bvoor%2Bwebapplicaties%2B%2B%2Bdeel%2B1%2B%2Bleesversie%2B.pdf) (in Dutch)

<comment><USER4> If you want to verify the complete chain or see if any of it is expired, I wrote some tools that'll do just that. It uses a pre-existing directory of CA certs (which you can generate with an included Makefile and cacert.pem) and downloads intermediaries.

[https://github.com/psypete/public-bin/tree/public- bin/src/ne...](https://github.com/psypete/public-bin/tree/public- bin/src/networking/check-ssl)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
        Just make a monthly recurring entry in your calendar that says "Check SSL certificates".

If you rely on your calendar, it's simpler to create an entry in your calender for changing the certificate a few days prior to its expiration date. Monthly reminders will be ignored too easily.

<comment><USER6> Better yet, add an SSL check to your monitoring system: open a ticket when it's going to expire in 30 days.

<comment><AUTHOR> FYI I updated the post to mention monitoring systems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > This is easy. Just make a monthly recurring entry in your calendar that says > "Check SSL certificates".

I was honestly expecting them to reference a monitoring service. It is possible to do for free with Nagios if you have a Linux box kicking around on your network. There are also paid services who will monitor your certificates and send you a nice email when there is 30 days left to renew (including several SSL registers).

<comment><USER2> Yes, do it automated and do it daily or even multiple times a day.

<comment><USER8> You need to automate it if you have more than 1 site. If you have just one site, you can just check the expiry date and put that in your calendar. No need to check it on a monthly basis, no clue why the author of the post would suggest that.

<comment><USER2> Even root or intermediate certificates can be misconfigured without notice, it doesn't need to be allways the expired date case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd go with 2048 RSA key length, and put the certificate subject straight in the command line:

      openssl req -nodes -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout www.example.com.2014.key -out www.example.com.2014.csr -subj "/C=COUNTRY/ST=STATE/L=CITY/O=COMPANY/OU=/CN=www.example.com"

I have exactly this in an Ansible playbook [https://github.com/tilsammans/playbook](https://github.com/tilsammans/playbook) (for rails).

<comment><AUTHOR> The `genrsa` command is generating 2048 bit keys already. I added `-sha256` and `-utf8` based on some other feedback, though. Thanks!

<comment><USER10> The "default" in many configs is still actually 1024 bits, which is of course too small.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3>
      Process
      - Know where your key is
      - Know how to generate a new CSR from that key

It's adviced to use a NEW private key, in case there was a private key compromise you didn't know about.

Also see [https://www.ssllabs.com/downloads/SSL_TLS_Deployment_Best_Pr...](https://www.ssllabs.com/downloads/SSL_TLS_Deployment_Best_Practices_1.3.pdf) (point 1.2).

BTW there is NO reason to regenerate the CSR if you reuse the private key.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah, that makes total sense. I'll update the post and the script.

Thanks!

 _Edit: updated_

<comment><USER11> You should not reuse private keys, you are wasting a opportunity to replace it if it has been compromised without your knowledge.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you want to be notified when your SSL certificates are about the expire, or when there's something wrong with them, I'm building a SaaS that will keep track of these things for you:

[http://www.domainsquire.com/](http://www.domainsquire.com/)

<comment><USER13> Best of luck with this! I had the same idea, but I prototyped a hack using django admin + cron jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> You can also configure alerts to be sent when domains and SSL certificates expire using Expiration Reminder. We already have customers using it specifically for SSLs:

[http://www.expirationreminder.net](http://www.expirationreminder.net)

</comment><comment><USER15> All the certificate providers I've used get pretty insistent about renewing certs (given the huge cash-cow it is for them), I'm surprised this is a very common issue.

<comment><USER16> I'd guess a lot of issues are it going to old email addresses. Either staff who have left, team or company names changing, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> slightly off topic: i wonder why google (or mozilla) do not add something like a "less secure" root CA service where everybody can get a ssl cert for free (after showing control over the domain).

this would degrade the annoying message to a simple warning and probably make lots of hobbyist websites use only ssl.

(if you have to choose between annoy your user or just using plain http i guess many choose the later.)

<comment><USER3> Ever heard of StartSSL Free?

[https://www.startssl.com/?app=39](https://www.startssl.com/?app=39)

<comment><USER18> StartSSL is great. I'm able to role and go live with SSL certs, now i've written down the process, in less than half an hour, with checking and all other stuff involved.

<comment><USER19> As much as I like the idea of free SSL certificates... For anything beyond a personal site, even an hour is crazy.

I can have a basic SSL certificate in 15 minutes at the outside for like $8. My time at work is worth a lot more than $8/hr.

<comment><USER18> I'm intrigued to know how the process for a 8$ cert is different to that of a basic free StartSSL cert. The last paid for certificate I got was a year ago, and getting a StartSSL certificate is just as streamlined a process as the paid one. The only thing I can think of is if you are talking about certificates with wild-card matching, which will save time on the individual certificates you have to get when free. But for $8, is it possible to get a wild-card matching one?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A good guide to creating your own CA to go with this:

[https://pki-tutorial.readthedocs.org](https://pki-tutorial.readthedocs.org)

<comment><USER21> Setting up your own CA is fine for certificates that will only be used internally, but anything customer facing needs a customer issuing certificate (unless you're a large enough company that can afford to get a certificate that allows you to sign new certs.)</comment></comment>


This Is How Chinese Models Get Photo Shoots Done Fast - <AUTHOR> https://petapixel.com/2017/07/22/chinese-models-get-photo-shoots-done-fast/ <comment><USER2> Speed quality cost. Pick two.

These photographs aren't very good. Yes, hundreds or thousands of photos per day is a lot. The difference between a good picture and a really good picture might be hours more setup and post processing.

This is stereotypical Chinese manufacturing tactics being applied to modeling. Cut workers rights, cut quality, setup, safety, compensation, and time to market.

In shear numbers it's impressive but when I see how they doing it, it's a face palm moment

<comment><USER3> This might be one of those (quantity === quality ) situations.

What's that parable about the pottery class? The class is split in half at the beginning of the semester. Half A has an assignment to produce as many clay pots as possible, Half B just has to produce one perfect clay pot by year-end. At the end of the year, Half B has failed to produce perfection, while Half A has produced a dozen perfect pots by accident just in the course of cranking them out.

You gotta dig through a lot of dirt to get to the gems, but at a certain scale, the gems get really good.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Who is applying to YC S14? - <AUTHOR>

Interested to know who is currently building a product with the goal of submitting an application to the YC S14 batch?<p>Would be great to connect and potential help each other out. <comment><USER2> Or help yourself: [http://jamescun.github.io/iPG/](http://jamescun.github.io/iPG/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's pretty awesome, but would really like to connect with actual people :)</comment></comment>


Hardware Debugging with JTAG on a Raspberry Pi - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/rust-embedded/rust-raspi3-OS-tutorials/tree/master/0B_hw_debug_JTAG <comment><USER2> I prefer to use the Black Magic Probe [1] because it doesn't need OpenOCD to be running (it hosts the GDB server itself) and it has an additional user USB/UART interface so that you only need one cable to connect your debugger and debug console.

That said, sometimes its multi-target support is not as friendly as I would like, and I'm not sure if the AARCH64 support is there yet (I used it on the original RasPi and on Chumbys)

Good news is that its open source and I was able to add SAM4L support when I needed it fairly easily.

[1] See [https://github.com/blacksphere/blackmagic](https://github.com/blacksphere/blackmagic) and [https://1bitsquared.com/products/black-magic- probe](https://1bitsquared.com/products/black-magic-probe)

<comment><USER3> The Black Magic Probe is really nice. If you want to try it out without spending the money for a BMP up front, it's also fairly simple to flash it onto a Blue Pill board that can be had for a few dollars. Most F103C8 Blue Pills are sold as having 64KB flash, but actually have 128KB flash. E.g. I installed BMP on a RobotDyn Blue Pill without any problems.

Of course, if you like the BMP, it is worthwhile to buy the real thing to sponsor 1 Bit Squared and the convenient headers/cables.

<comment><USER4> You can also try JTAG Versaloon firmware for the STM32 Bluepill board:

[https://github.com/zoobab/versaloon](https://github.com/zoobab/versaloon)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Kernel boot over JTAG, awesome!

Let's try versaloon on a bluepill to replace the JTAG Olimex adaptor....</comment>


How Yelp May Have Further Harmed The App Store Approval Process - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/28/how-yelp-may-have-further-harmed-the-app-store-approval-process-with-its-easter-egg/ <comment><USER2> And yet, Apple hasn't pulled the app from the app store or said anything negative about it at all. He's just making noise because he runs an AR startup and didn't think of sneaking AR into his app and Yelp did.

<comment><USER3> 'sneaking' being the operative word. Obviously the writer has skin in the game (and this is acknowledged up front), but the real issue here is that Yelp is only getting away with this because they're a very established player with a powerful brand that can afford to take the risk of defying Apple.

Mr Galligan is working for a little nothing company that would probably just receive a shrug here on HN if they did the same thing. By observing the terms of their development agreement in good faith, their business model has now suffered relative to the competition. I have no idea whether his startup's ideas/technology are worse, the same, or better, but we're that much less likely to find out now because a more established competitor has (apparently) got away with ignoring the terms of that same agreement because they can.

Good thing Yelp wasn't offering voicemail, eh?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Sure, cause Yelp is the first app to include hidden features or use undocumented API calls. Please.

Reminded me of this post:

<http://steveblank.com/2009/08/24/the-end-of-innocence/>

</comment><comment><USER5> apparently apple thinks grep is is for sissies.

</comment><comment><USER6> Isn't this a good thing, if it doesn't get pulled AR apps will have to have different reasoning for being rejected.

<comment><USER7> Ahh, your comment is so innocent, so pure. It's cute, even.</comment></comment>


Microsoft's new x86 DataCenter class machines running Windows (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/13522/896-xeon-cores-in-one-pc-microsofts-new-x86-datacenter-class-machines-running-windows <comment><USER2> From one of the comments on the article

> I think Intel / Microsoft have found a way to interconnects scalable and > this comes interesting thought on value of have more cores on cpu. > Especially if system was designed to be pluggable and if one of cpu's failed > than it does not bring entire system down.

I think this is an interesting point. If the QPI links on the Xeon Platinum is restricted to 3, I wonder what the 32 socket mesh looks like and what implications that has on availability of the system as a whole if one CPU was to fail. Also, unless these are fully NUMA aware workloads or each socket was dedicated to a VM, the latency has to be terrible for memory access especially if the interconnect is multiple hops away. Clearly it's not going to be a fully connected mesh?

<comment><USER3> This starts to blur the line in my head between the low-level system concepts that your compiler/OS has to think about and the concepts you have to think about for distributes systems.

With the hardware systems and interconnects today, we've drawn a line in the sand based on what we've seen work and fail. Something like Redis is fairly well understood for many architectures. But when you have crazy NUMA architectures and different memory models like Intel Optane, what changes? Where do you draw the "new" line for when to use Redis vs keep everything "local" to one box?

Will we see a local Kubernetes extension (or new software) that makes building for "massive boxes" easier?

Kind of a cool idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> > Back in the days pre-Nehalem, the big eight socket 32-core servers were all > the rage, but today not so much, and unless a company is willing to spend > $250k+ (before support contracts or DRAM/NAND) on a single 8-socket system, > it's reserved for the big players in town. Today, those are the cloud > providers.

SAP HANA is a major driver for single servers with the maximum number of cores and maximum memory per core that Intel supports. This is true for on-premise as well as Azure [1] and AWS [2] IaaS.

I think of it as commodity scale-up and the superior price-per-performance applies to any hybrid in-memory column store though HANA seems to be the only offering that exploits this approach. You can store a lot of data in 24 TB (or more) of in-memory compressed bitmap indexes.

[1] [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual- machines/work...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual- machines/workloads/sap/hana-available-skus)

[2] [https://aws.amazon.com/sap/solutions/saphana/](https://aws.amazon.com/sap/solutions/saphana/)

<comment><USER5> Fun quote:

> From what we have heard from both OEMs and Intel, the vast majority of > 8-socket servers today are sold in China. The most common reason for this > that we hear is not because of the scale-up benefits. Instead, it is because > of the numerology of the 8. It just so happens that 8 in China is a lucky > number, much like 7 is considered by many in the US to be a lucky number.

[https://www.servethehome.com/why-all-servers-are- not-4-socke...](https://www.servethehome.com/why-all-servers-are-not-4-socket- servers/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The late 1990s called and want their Numalink back.

<comment><USER7> Some of the successful large-socket-count servers, specifically SGI Ultraviolet series (now sold by HPE AFAIK) actually use NUMAlink - a much updated version, but the basic remain the same as with MIPS and Itanium systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> This is from 2018. Can we add that to the title?

<comment><USER8> Good catch. Added. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Why does HN sometimes truncate leading words/numbers in submissions? The actual title is "869 Xeon Cores...."

<comment><USER10> Those are common clickbait patterns.

<comment><USER11> No kidding. Despite the HN posters saying it's "factual" this is likely just 4 socket systems tied together with an interconnect.

If intel is really going to market these type of systems, they need to be a LOT LOT more transparent on interconnect latency / memory management issues etc.

These headlines are almost always clickbait when you try to run high contention workloads on these supposedly massive systems.

What is the name of the interconnect approach being used here? That's what I want to know.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h If it runs a single system image, how is it different from any other NUMA system or a big.little arrangement?

<comment><USER11> Some big.little's have very good interconnect / memory access. Some systems have remote NUMA memory - you are going off one board over an internconnect to another board to memory there.

The headline is so misleading. I could wire together a ton of machines over 10mbs, and yes, I could get NUMA going on it and a high core count, but the performance would be horrendous. Maybe you could even run super NUMA over DB9 9 bit serial ports with remote memory access latency in hours?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Like lipstick on a pig.

<comment><USER13> Thank you for the mental image of a compute stick running lisp.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Implementing UDP live – Write webgames today that use UDP, not TCP - <AUTHOR> https://www.twitch.tv/avaer?1 <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, avaer and I have been working on a competitor to Chrome and Firefox. As strange as it sounds, we seem to be winning -- our performance is >2x faster than Chrome and FF. You can prove this to yourself today, right now, by running `exokit zeovr.io` (which runs [https://zeovr.io](https://zeovr.io) in our browser instead of Chrome).

Let me back up.

1\. Go to [https://zeovr.io](https://zeovr.io). Note that it appears to be a Minecraft clone. (This is what originally hooked me into working with avaer. I was blown away that someone had apparently cloned Minecraft successfully.)

2\. Note that you're not getting a smooth 90FPS. On my 2015 MBP, I get about 12FPS.

3\. Install exokit: `npm i -g exokit`

4\. Run `exokit zeovr.io`

5\. Note that you get 3x the FPS of Chrome. It should be butter smooth on most semi-modern computers. (If you bought your laptop within the last 3 years, chances are you're staring at a solid 90FPS.)

6\. Note that zeovr.io runs in Chrome! Meaning it's just a website.

You can build things like this today, right now. No need to wait for anyone. It works, and we're showing it off on the stream live.

We submitted this Show HN on a lark and figured that it probably won't go anywhere. But as long as we focus on delivering something good and on talking to users, we figure the rest will follow.

The stream's viewer count doubled tonight, and it was mostly thanks to some grassroots community support. There's a ~crapload of work to do to get this done for real, so if anyone wants to pitch in, there's always _something_ you can help out with. We need to set up docs, a support website, test installers, set up continuous update, and just say hi to people as they show up and make them feel welcome. Everyone can do that last part :)

Here's an example. If you go to [https://emkolar.ninja](https://emkolar.ninja), it appears to be a regular website: A portfolio showing off her projects.

If you run `exokit emkolar.ninja`, it shows a 3D rubik's cube using threejs.

And if you have a Vive headset, you see the cube in 3D and can physically move your head around to look at it from different angles.

You also have access to the Vive controller API, so it's very easy to make the cube respond based on the controller's orientation.

Now for the best part: Everything you've just seen also runs on the Magic Leap. Today. I think avaer's probably the first person in the world to integrate with the Magic Leap simulator so thoroughly. He exposed all the relevant APIs to Javascript, as web standards. Meaning you can write websites right now that runs in Chrome, on the Vive, and in the Magic Leap.

And if you happen to have a pair of ML goggles (Hi Rony!) you can even see it running live in the real world.

Here's another example. Right now you can't write a web game that uses UDP. There's WebRTC, which is horribly complicated. When I was a kid I taught myself network programming with Beej's guide: [http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/html/single/bgnet.html](http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/html/single/bgnet.html)

WebRTC is the polar opposite of that simplicity.

So tonight I was like, "Hey avaer, how muche effort do you think it would be to expose UDP to websites?"

To his credit, he was very hesitant. He pointed out that there are security concerns and standards concerns. But, theroetically, it could be done in ten minutes.

"So do it."

Ten minutes later we shipped, and we now have a global `dgram` variable that you can use: [https://nodejs.org/api/dgram.html#dgram_dgram_createsocket_o...](https://nodejs.org/api/dgram.html#dgram_dgram_createsocket_options_callback)

If you write a website like this:

      if (typeof dgram !== 'undefined') {
        /* use UDP here */
      }

Then it will run properly in Chrome. But if you run it in exokit, it will work! You can proceed to write games using UDP.

I would say the hardest part is conveying to people "This is just a website. You already know how to do this. You can do this right now. It's real."

We don't have to wait for Chrome or Firefox to ship standards anymore. And speaking as both a user and a cofounder, that's exciting as hell.</comment>


Why Goldman Sachs wants junior bankers to take weekends off - <AUTHOR> http://www.cnbc.com/id/101152612 <comment><USER2> _For the most part, the jobs in tech are just better jobs. The senior people you work for are less likely to treat you as if you are "useless" and only worth what you're paid because you are "available at all hours."

The work is more psychologically rewarding and has less social stigma attached to it. You don't have to wear a tie. And there is the perception among young people that the potential financial upside is larger in tech than in banking (this is not entirely accurate but that's beside the point). Goldman's move to free up the weekends of investment banking analysts is no doubt driven by an understanding that the market has changed. Finance no longer has a monopoly on smart kids looking to make a lot of money. It has to compete to win them away from tech._

This is exactly it. Investment banking barely pays more than tech for analysts. Banking IT pays engineers less than Google or Twitter. Add in the social prestige, quality of life, and respect from management, and it's understandable why they are having a harder time hiring the best.

Goldman has a choice: Pay a lot more, Accept less worthy talent, or treat them better. They chose #3.

<comment><USER3> Entry-level engineers in NY or CA with a relevant degree make more than entry- level investment bankers on Wall Street..

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure I agree, but if I'm wrong, it even further explains why GS is doing what they do.

My impression is that the analysts can make 100K in year 1, and 200+K by year 3 or 4, but no equity. I would think that folks at Google making 200K after 3 or 4 years are outliers. Please correct me if I'm wrong, as I'm a little out of touch for what large tech firms pay.

<comment><USER3> Nah, analysts will make 100Kish for up to 3 years, where they can then be promoted to associate which is 150-200K, maybe more if they are great or the firm has a great year. Some firms offer up to 150K for entry-levels but half that comp is an end-of-year bonus which sucks because its at the end of the year (lock-in) and it gets taxed at a higher rate.

Engineers at the big tech firms pull in 100K+ (this plus literally means up to 200K.. more for some real talent) with solid signing bonuses as a starting salary. No end-of-year lock-in bs either.

<comment><USER2> More on folks leaving Wall Street here....

[http://www.cnbc.com/id/101156782](http://www.cnbc.com/id/101156782)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Problem potentially even more dire than article makes it

"These jobs pay very well. According to the job search site Indeed.com, the average salary for an entry level software engineer in New York City is $71,000—just about the average for an entry level investment banker."

is a very misleading statistic. At a good school maybe the top 5% of a graduating finance class gets banking jobs. Pretty much every single CE or CS major gets a job in technology if they want one. The top 5% goes to work for a top tech firm who routinely pay 1st years 100-120k+, with amazing perks, work life balance, and tremendous growth potential.

<comment><USER5> The salary is just base. Bonus is probably 100-250% of base, and a lot of times the 100% part is guaranteed. Just for comparison sake.

<comment><USER6> Not for junior analysts, and not in this economy. Average base + bonus seems to be just over $100k for junior IB analysts at GS/MS/JPM this year, pushing to just over $200k after a few years. After that, the banker starts to pull away rapidly, and can earn the 100%+ bonuses. But on the flip side, you can probably still expect to have a job at Google in a few years, but the standard for investment banks is a 2 year contract after which only the best analysts are retained.

<comment><USER7> Nope. 120-130K all in for top bucket in 2013, with some firms paying 140-160K (see BAML and Moelis).

Also not true is the 2 year contract, as GS is moving towards a career model and away from a 2 year analyst model.

[http://www.mergersandinquisitions.com/2013-investment- bankin...](http://www.mergersandinquisitions.com/2013-investment-banking- bonuses/)

[http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-09-13/goldman-sachs- st...](http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-09-13/goldman-sachs-stops-giving- two-year-contracts-to-junior-bankers)

<comment><USER6> How is "120-130K all in for top bucket in 2013" different from what I said (average just over $100k)? I'm thinking average at GS/MS/JPM for first years was ~$110k, no? As for Goldman, I'm aware they're getting rid of the contract, but it's still standard practice in the industry as a whole. Also, just because the contract is going away doesn't mean "up or out" is going away. At the end of the day you have to weight those high salaries for more senior bankers against the fact that the recruiting model of investment banks involves only a fraction of new hires making it even past a few years.

<comment><USER7> Just over 100k and 130k or $160k (Moelis) makes all the difference for what the parent comment said, which is that bonus is is 100-125% of base (65k)

<comment><USER6> No, parent comment said: "Bonus is _probably_ 100-250% of base, and _a lot of times_ the 100% part is guaranteed."

The plain meaning of that is that $130k all-in (100% bonus) is typical, and often guaranteed, with the top bucket being over $225k (250% bonus).

With first-year salaries at Google, etc, pushing $120k+, that's a very relevant difference. It's not accurate to imply that a first-year analyst at a bank could make up to $100k more than that.

<comment><USER7> You're right, I misread the top end of that range. Top trading firms get close to that, (e.g. Jane Street), but $225k is probably pushing unlikely until your 3rd year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I graduated with a degree in CS from Columbia in 2007, at the peak of the finance boom. Most of my classmates at least considered a job at an i-bank; a lot of us had internships. I had a sweet job offer from Morgan Stanley waiting for me that I turned down to leave NYC for good (good riddance!). It was such a crazy time then, but it was all we knew. There was a constant stream of crazy, lavish recruiting events on campus from all the banks; it seemed like everyone was going to go work for them and that was normal.

Three years later, and the only people in my cohort who still work at the banks are those who seemed to be in the lower tier of students. Everyone else had either moved to GOOG, a start up, or San Francisco. I'd love to see what the on-campus culture is now.

<comment><USER9> I just graduated from Columbia CS last year and what you describe your friends doing now seems to be the norm for seniors looking for jobs. Google definitely had higher profile recruiting events than any of the banks. There are still a few looking at jobs in the finance sector but not nearly what I had heard about coming into Columbia.

<comment><USER8> Awesome, glad to hear that. I was president of the ACM for a year, and we totally stuffed our budget from organizing i-bank recruiting events.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Yes but when you actually look at this in detail by reading the comments of real IB types - a lot of those hours are just presentism they dont really do much more in an 8:30 till 11 Pm day than you would in a normal 8 hour day.

<comment><USER5> They do a lot, but it is just iterating the same thing over and over.

<comment><USER11> Once, I made the mistake of asking a more senior IB analyst the following question at a party (I did not know him well):

"Some junior investment banking analysts work over 100 hours a week. There is no way that anyone is firing at full steam mentally pulling those hours weekly, because science. Why don't banks just hire twice as many analysts and pay them all half as much to get more intellectual bang for their buck?"

He was not pleased.

Thoughts on what this means for our changing economy (and brunch):

[http://robmcfeeley.com/post/65530961398/goldman-sachs- encour...](http://robmcfeeley.com/post/65530961398/goldman-sachs-encourages- junior-bankers-to-take)

<comment><USER4> Banking is a relationship business. The hours aren't so much for productivity as for bonding. Think of it as a frat initiation ritual that lasts years. Some very small portion of IB analysts remain in IB, most move off and become successful somewhere else, building an incredibly strong network of captains of industry over time, all tied back to that particular investment bank.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Investment banking jobs are also, generally, available only in NYC, specifically Manhattan, where the cost of living is matched only by San Francisco (in the US). There are still many high-paying jobs in software development in a variety of cities outside of the major tech hubs.

</comment><comment><USER13> What a horribly edited story.

Word that Goldman Sachs is discouraging its junior investment bankers to take weekends off initially prompted scoffing.

That sentence is awkward, and I understood it to be the opposite of the meaning implied by the following sentence.

</comment><comment><USER14> Are you kidding me? I've worked in tech consulting since leaving university, spent a lot of time at Accenture and have worked just as many hours per week as my friends in the big 4 banks.

</comment><comment><USER15> maybe they are trying to disclaim blue law violations.</comment>


Hn-sonar: get notified for HN replies to your comments. No email address needed - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Decagon/hn-sonar/ <comment><USER2> This looks great - thanks!</comment>


General Chaos: Senior Military Officers on the White House - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/11/military-officers-trump/598360 <comment><AUTHOR> Don't be dissuaded by the noise around the topic; the article is worth reading in full.</comment>


'Science as the Enemy': The Traveling Salesmen of Climate Skepticism - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,721846,00.html

<comment><USER3> I hate politics. They muck up everything and make it hard for me to learn the truth.

Right now, I am inclined to be suspicious of global warming folks, especially the extreme apocalyptic alarmist version.

I am apt to believe that global warming will be good for some people and bad for some people. However, when it is _uniformity_ bad. Something is wrong.

I also dislike oil interests getting energy subsidy, or refinery cannot be built, and stuff like that. I knew that the higher price of oil _will_ drive technological research for energy efficient.

I also thought the current pollution and emission _crisis?_ have much to do with the government building roads all over the place, encouraging automotive usage instead of letting transportation evolved naturally.

Something is wrong with this debate. Especially if people are calling others unscientific for adherence to one side of the debate. This is not the bible contradicting the words of evolution, people.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's my understanding that the EPA's 1993 study on second hand smoke was only able to achieve its desired result by redefining the previously accepted statistical threshold of "scientific truth". If that's indeed the case (I don't know or exactly care, since I'm just plain allergic to it) then calling it "junk science" is only speaking the truth.

I only skimmed this article; I sure hope it doesn't try to deny that a lot of science, and most especially a lot of medical science, is _highly_ politicized and often just plain wrong. If you've been following Official Truth on fats for the last 4 decades as I have you can discern for yourself that _something_ is seriously amiss.

Worse, if the people who excessively slammed fats pushed people to carbohydrates and thus diabetes (I think this is only speculation now, but it's hopefully getting a serious look) then they have a lot to answer for.

Heck, how about the previous US Official Truth that babies should be placed on their stomach for sleep. Oops, that _may_ have had a significant effect on SIDS: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_sleep>

<comment><USER5> _the previously accepted statistical threshold of "scientific truth"_

This concept heartily amuses me. Care to say more?

<comment><USER4> I think it was a meta-analysis (a study using multiple original studies) and I recall 95% being a number of significance. As in it was either the previous or new, improved and of course lower threshold of "truth" (or rather statistical significance or whatever). I'm going by a 2nd or 3rd hand report, but the reported details are simple and easily falsifiable.

(ADDED: Or maybe it's 90% and they used 85%??? Anyway, that should give you enough to search on if you want to follow it up.)

Epidemiology is _hard_. When it's about a politicized topic (and almost all are nowadays) I've learned to just not pay much attention to any one study, at least until others have a chance to tear it apart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "97 percent of all climatologists worldwide __assume__ that greenhouse gases produced by humans are warming the Earth"

</comment><comment><USER7> I really don't like the recent conflation of contrarianism with skepticism.

Skepticism should be the default stance of all scientists. That does not mean that their conclusions will be at odds with the initial idea simply because they are skeptical.

</comment><comment><USER8> "A handful of US scientists have made names for themselves by casting doubt on global warming research. In the past, the same people have also downplayed the dangers of passive smoking, acid rain and the ozone hole. In all cases, the tactics are the same: Spread doubt and claim it's too soon to take action."

Global warming (global cooling, climate change) is starting to sound like a religion. I always start to question things when:

1) It's about the money. The same people that claim that global warming is a problem are also invested in carbon credits (including Al Gore). Not to mention the fact that governments use it to fill their pockets with billions of dollars in tax revenue (we need a TV, radion, and Human tax because we emit carbon dioxide).

2) Any scientist that even hints at mis-information regarding global warming (and backs it up with stats) is immediately attacked and discredited.

3) Those emails that circulated were pretty damning, yet supports still won't believe it. They falsified information and many universities and organizations came out (before anyone investigated) to admit that yes, they were also using this info.

"With his sonorous voice, Fred Singer, 86, sounded like a grandfather explaining the obvious to a dim-witted child."

For a minute, I thought this article was on the onion.com

<comment><USER9> Your ridiculous talking points are well overplayed. Let us start with the e-mails - point out where they were "damning" and where information was "falsified", hint: it didn't happen, you're a fish swallowing a hook.

<comment><USER10> There were several long discussions about this on this very site at the time, and many of us remember those discussions, so it's going to be difficult to spread FUD about them.

Here's a pointer to a bunch of them, in case you missed the whole debacle: [http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+c...](http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+climategate)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > According to a US study, 97 percent of all climatologists worldwide assume > that greenhouse gases produced by humans are warming the Earth.

This is a lot like saying "97 percent of all feminists believe that patriarchal oppression is holding women back."

You don't go into climatology unless you think it's a big deal. See, I think global warming (1) exists, (2) is a mix of man made and natural cycles, (3) _is not a big deal at all_. Apocalyptic global warming just seems obviously false based on everything I've looked at.

Now, perhaps I'm mistaken. I didn't make this comment to argue the case - <USER2> I wanted is to point out that because my layman's understanding is that it's not a big deal, I don't go into the field. You'd expect anyone in the field to think it's a big deal.</comment>


The One in Which I Call Out Hacker News (2009) - <AUTHOR> http://bitquabit.com/post/one-which-i-call-out-hacker-news/ <comment><USER2> > I'm sure any open-source clones will rabidly follow it—just as GNOME and KDE > for years slavishly copied off Windows, instead of trying to fix its most > obvious flaws.

I find it amusingly ironic that a post which is calling people out on casual ignorance and dismissal of the effort that goes into other people's software makes its point by... casual ignorance and dismissal of the effort that goes into other people's software.

</comment><comment><USER3> This sort of thing is a good indication of the technical maturity level of a programmer. Over simplifying the design of software and "feature list" thinking are perfect examples of technical immaturity and naivete. Even a very simple system with a small number of moving parts requires a lot of skilled and subtle work in order to ensure it works reliably, at the appropriate level of performance, and in a way that is usable. In a way good programmers make it more difficult for younger programmers to notice these things, since an elegant design might reflect innumerable man-hours of careful decision making and improvement but it works so well and so smoothly and with so few parts that it can seem almost trivial.

When someone sees a line of code such as the classic "fast inverse square root" it's obvious that it's necessary to take a step back, to realize that you're not going to understand the depths of what's going on intuitively, that there is likely a lot of deep optimization and balancing going on with that code. But when we see code that doesn't have a big clanking WTF in the middle of it, when we see code that seems to make intuitive sense, we don't tend to ponder the optimization and tradeoffs that went into it. But in truth those can be just as deep and just as profound for ordinary looking code as for obviously clever stuff. That goes double when you only use the software.

Consider a thought experiment: replicating google. The naive answer is that it's easy, all you need is a big DB, a web crawler to load up the DB, and a search frontend. And that might work, but it would be terrible. It would be horrendously expensive and produce profoundly disappointing results with even more profoundly disappointing performance. From an end-user perspective google is simple, but the complexities and the elegances underneath are the important bits, and those are much more challenging to replicate.

<comment><USER4> "In a way good programmers make it more difficult for younger programmers to notice these things, since an elegant design might reflect innumerable man- hours of careful decision making and improvement but it works so well and so smoothly and with so few parts that it can seem almost trivial."

"[W]hen we see code that doesn't have a big clanking WTF in the middle of it, when we see code that seems to make intuitive sense, we don't tend to ponder the optimization and tradeoffs that went into it. But in truth those can be just as deep and just as profound for ordinary looking code as for obviously clever stuff. That goes double when you only use the software."

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.

I want to write more, but in those two quotes you've managed to articulate something that I've been thinking about quite a bit recently.

Good software doesn't seem good. It is invisible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I feel like the OP here is making two arguments, one of which I agree with whole-heartedly, and one that I disagree with vehemently.

The first argument seems to reduce to the same basic idea entailed in expressions like "The first 90% is easy, it's the second 90% that gets you". Or "the devil is in the details". That I totally agree with. The seemingly trivial, small details absolutely add up and constitute a TON of working in getting a system into a truly "finished" and polished state.

But the second argument seems to amount to what I find to be a tired and inaccurate meme - "Open source software sucks because developers don't think like end users". OK, to be fair, _some_ Open Source software does, indeed, suck at UI and usability, and maybe it _is_ because most developers aren't good at UX. But by no stretch of the imagination does this apply to all (or maybe even "most") OSS, and also, it's hardly the case that proprietary software is necessarily better in this regard. Have you used, for example, Oracle's back-end / financials software? F%#@ that... Hideous (or at least it was last time I used it).

All of that said, this issue is near and dear to my heart, because this is something we think a lot about at Fogbeam. Luckily one of our founders is a designer and UI/UX specialist, so we have a leg up on some other open source projects. And while we don't have the clean UI and the awesome UX we want just yet, we aren't finished either. Our commitment is to absolutely nail User Experience, and be better than anybody else in our space, Open Source OR proprietary. Yes, we still have a lot of work to do, but that's the goal.

<comment><USER6> Yeah I totally agree. There is tons of very high quality open source software. Some of the designs I have encountered while looking at the source code is breathtaking. I think more code monsters lurk in propriety code, its just in the commercial world they are good at paint jobs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's entertaining to me that the google code repo created for the purpose of cloning Stack Exchange "in a weekend"[1] contains nothing.

The 3 issues are kind of funny as well.

[http://code.google.com/p/hackerexchange/source/browse/#svn](http://code.google.com/p/hackerexchange/source/browse/#svn)

</comment><comment><USER8> I know there is probably an actual definition of the 80/20 rule somewhere, but here's my interpretation, which I think gels with the article. 80% of the work is done quickly , which is the absolute core stuff, with 0 polish and full of edge-case data and interface bugs. Then the last 20% of the work takes roughly equal to the first 80%. The percentages have nothing to do with actual work completed or time spent, rather how complete it looks to the client/your boss/someone with no details of the technical implementation.

And that's only to get to 1.0. Some of these features would be unnecessary for launch but should be added post-launch, e.g., the editor imo.

EDIT: Looking it up there is an 80-20 rule that I think is in a similar vein but if applied properly to this situation would say that 80% of the work exists in 20% of the features.

Which may even be true sometimes.

</comment><comment><USER9> > The One in Which I Call Out Hacker News (bitquabit.com)

> 5 points by sebkomianos 25 minutes ago | flag | discuss

You probably want to put (2009) in the title somewhere...

<comment><USER10> I was wondering why I couldn't find the post the author was referring to...

<comment><USER11> If you want some more context, I _think_ that [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678501](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678501) was the inspiration for the blog post, in part because I have a rant attached to that comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When a developer says "That looks/sounds easy; I could knock that up in a weekend!" about a project, they have to be especially more careful about who is within earshot.

Heaven forfend a manager type gets a whiff of an over-optimistic estimate -- that's a great recipe for a completely avoidable death-march.

<comment><USER13> I use such off-the-cuff estimates as red flags indicating developers who have likely never built anything scratch; the number of 10x devs who could do such projects "in a weekend" are small, and even then, they would still probably not make such claims with certainty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I agree, it's easy to bust a sloppy pile of garbage that won't hold up load. It's hard to build a robust well engineered solution for millions. Good post, no matter when it was written.

</comment><comment><USER15> Relevant xkcd:

[http://xkcd.com/386/](http://xkcd.com/386/)

</comment><comment><USER16> He compares PostgreSQL (Open Source) to MS-SQL (Proprietary) for one feature (initial setup), but I don't see him comparing things like sqlplus (Oracle/Proprietary) to psql (PostgreSQL/Open Source).

<comment><USER11> What conclusion did you expect I'd draw, had I compared those two? I have zero experience with Oracle, and copious amounts with both PostgreSQL and MS SQL, so I was focusing on things I actually knew about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I see nothing wrong with releasing an utterly bare-bones version, like the schema one he mentions, i.e. a MVP. Then, you polish over time. Even SO wasn't a SO clone at launch. (Of course, if someone promised a complete clone, that's foolish).

The big problem is that you can't get started on this upward curve, because no one will use it, since SO already exists and is far better. There's no oxygen.

[a different story if SO suddenly stopped meeting needs e.g. turned expertsexchange in cash-pursuit]

</comment><comment><USER18> You wouldn't really describe this guy as a "can do" sort of person, would you?

<comment><USER19> I'd describe him as someone who has actually been around the block, as the saying goes. Compare that with this:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6486142](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6486142)

Kinda speaks for itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's my turn to call out Hacker News now. How did a submission from 2009 that isn't really relevant now as it was in reference to comments made on Hacker News back in 2009 make it to the homepage? I'll sit back and watch people bite though. And for the record, I know there were numerous clones of SO made. Probably not in a weekend, but come on, the hardest part about Stack Overflow isn't how it is coded, it's scaling the site up for the millions of views it probably gets on a daily basis. You can build a clone of Stack Overflow using Wordpress with Buddypress, a Markdown plugin, JSON API plugin and the Cubepoints plugin.

Articles like this always make me laugh, especially when talked 4 years after they were written.

<comment><USER21> Lets disregard the age of the article for one moment. I think that the author is making a good point, developers oversimplify applications and when they begin to work it turns out that it's a hundred times more complicated then initially thought. Very valid.</comment></comment>


Value of the Cloud (CPU Performance) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.cloudharmony.com/2013/06/value-of-the-cloud-cpu-performance.html

<comment><USER2> They're using a pretty fuzzy definition of "core", but otherwise this is a great post. The only thing lacking is comparison to bare metal servers with similar specs (as was mention in the EC2 gripefest the other day).

<comment><USER3> Author here, "core" is a fuzzy term I suppose, but it's often the most disclosed by services to the outside world. I agree it would be interesting to compare these metrics to some baremetal numbers. It would then be relatively easy to determine if they are dedicated cores of the type advertised.</comment></comment>


Car Physics for Games - <AUTHOR> http://www.asawicki.info/Mirror/Car%20Physics%20for%20Games/Car%20Physics%20for%20Games.html <comment><USER2> One thing to add is that the physics for tire simulation are are just as complicated, if not more, than all the other physics. And incorrect tire simulations can give you some odd behavior. Very good article though.

The Pacejka magic formula was refined to help model the tire interactions with the ground. <http://www.racer.nl/reference/pacejka.htm></comment>


Analyzing JMeter Application Performance Results - <AUTHOR> http://apmblog.dynatrace.com/2016/04/20/analyzing-jmeter-application-performance-results/ <comment><USER2> Step one should have been - dump jmeter for gatling. End of post about visualization

</comment><comment><USER3> It looks like JMeter itself has been updated recently which is nice.

It's always been one of those tools I hate using but can't live without because it's job so well.

<comment><USER4> I find JMeter's UX and documentation impenetrable. Every time I've sat down and tried to use it I've basically given up and just ended up writing some custom code to run load and soak tests.

<comment><USER3> Did you try to use it or did you go through a tutorial? I find going through a tutorial on it was necessary, you aren't going to learn via intuitiveness. Once you "get" it it's pretty good.

I'd love a version that worked better with source control though.

<comment><USER5> _that worked better with source control though._

How so?

<comment><USER3> Merging is always hard in any machine generated file. I'd prefer to drive it with a proper script rather than the current ui generated xml file.

<comment><USER6> Taurus sort of does this. [http://gettaurus.org/](http://gettaurus.org/)

<comment><USER3> I'll put it on my list to investigate.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sex toy startup seeking investment, where do we look? - <AUTHOR> Hi,
My name is Eric, and I'm based in Sweden. 1,5 years ago, me and my partner had an idea for a new type of adult toy for women. We made a prototype and gave it to a couple of friends and strangers for testing, and it turned out that we had found an innovation in the most fundamental part of the toy, which showed really really good results amongst our testers. The product is simple (key feature), discrete and relatively cheap to produce. We have a pending patent.
We spent the last 1,5 years developing this product, and have now reached a partnership with a big brand in this space who are willing to sell this product under their name. We have a production line ready. What we need now is money to produce the first batch. Does anyone know where we could look for an investor who would be willing to enter the space of adult toys with us? Where do we look?
Thanks. <comment><USER2> I would try pitching established companies in the same space. Incumbents often invest in newcomers in other industries -- might work here too.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is what we have been doing. The very first company we presented to liked it and we are now going forward with them. Until that is a no, we can't pitch to another company, that is how we formulated our contract, and it is a mutual deal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why not run a kickstarter/indiegogo campaign?

<comment><USER4> This is probably a good idea since the product obviously applies to a large portion of society, rather than a specific niche.

<comment><USER5> OP says its easy to produce. Kickstarter may not be good.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Contact me with details.

One of my clients (i cover technical aspects) is well known sex and relationship therapist with large following and connections.

There might be an opportunity here.

<comment><AUTHOR> Done, I appreciate it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've found the following people on Twitter are willing to talk & offer what they know about the industry:

@SaucyStartups

@JennyPurr

@cindygallop

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank's a lot!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not an investor but just curious roughly how much money you need?

<comment><AUTHOR> €100.000

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm interested. Tell me more!

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have an email I can reach you with?

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, you could reach me at email@example.com if you want to continue talking!</comment></comment></comment>


Decoding radio telemetry heard on news helicopter video footage with GNU Radio - <AUTHOR> https://www.rtl-sdr.com/decoding-radio-telemetry-heard-on-news-helicopter-video-footage-with-gnu-radio/ <comment><USER2> Highly recommend the "Advisory Circular Project"[1]. It takes ADS-B data grabbed from a network of 3000 pi+gnu radios [2], analyzes them for aircraft flying in circles(!), and tweets out the images[3].

This is better than FlightAware as you are getting raw unfiltered ADS-B/Mode S/MLAT location data broadcast from the aircraft and aren't filtering out position only flights.

Here is an instance of the California Highway Patrol observation plane circling downtown Oakland last night for some reason: [https://twitter.com/skycirclessf/status/1268408145224720384?...](https://twitter.com/skycirclessf/status/1268408145224720384?s=21)

[1] [https://gitlab.com/jjwiseman/advisory- circular/](https://gitlab.com/jjwiseman/advisory-circular/)

[2] [https://www.adsbexchange.com/](https://www.adsbexchange.com/)

[3] [https://twitter.com/skycirclesdc/status/1268332759358947328?...](https://twitter.com/skycirclesdc/status/1268332759358947328?s=21)

<comment><USER3> This is really cool. Pretty remarkable how a relatively simple heuristic captures the behavior so effectively.

Also, take a look at the timestamps for the most recent tweets from @skycirclesla.

Would be cool if the adsbexchange project added some audio fingerprinting and even skyward-facing cameras to start detecting and even identifying aircraft that don't sqwawk/squit/etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Just because it takes a few clicks from the article to get there, Oona Raisanen (aka windytan) did this originally.

[http://www.windytan.com/2014/02/mystery-signal-from- helicopt...](http://www.windytan.com/2014/02/mystery-signal-from- helicopter.html)

If this interests you at all highly recommend you check out her blog.

<comment><USER4> Oona has super interesting projects in the blog. Can highly recommend too!

<comment><USER3> Her 'sounds of dial-up' image is poster-worthy - [https://oona.windytan.com/posters/dialup- final.png](https://oona.windytan.com/posters/dialup-final.png)

<comment><USER5> Pure curiosity but do you know what software was used to generate the spectrogram in that poster?

The color scale used in it really looks like the old-school cathode ray oscilloscope displays.

edit: found it, windytan actually mentioned it in the blog page. It was done using 'baudline'. ([http://baudline.com/](http://baudline.com/))

<comment><USER3> She makes a lot of use of baudline. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGdg_VC9LDI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGdg_VC9LDI)

Sometimes it's a pain in the ass to get it dialed in but once you do it's hard to beat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I tried to do this years ago while working at TV station with a helicopter and despite owning (well, leasing) the chopper and owning the microwave equipment the vendor would not release a way to decode the lat/long data used to track the video antenna, which I wanted to pull into a google map to show the choppers position.

So instead I gave the pilot an early smartphone (this was 2006) set up to use cellular to send back lat/long data and pulled it in that way, resulting in this:

[https://techcrunch.com/2008/05/16/become-a-virtual- newscopte...](https://techcrunch.com/2008/05/16/become-a-virtual-newscopter- passenger-on-airfox-live/)

<comment><USER7> Very cool! Is there a copy of that video linked in the article somewhere? It 404s

<comment><USER6> I found a screenshot! [https://www.newscaststudio.com/wp- content/uploads/2008/05/ai...](https://www.newscaststudio.com/wp- content/uploads/2008/05/airfox.jpg)

<comment><USER8> Either you really did, 17min ago, or you just trolled us all with a "403: forbidden" for laughs.

<comment><USER9> The site has referer check. Enter the url manually (not click via hn), and the image loads fine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I took a quick listen to the audio, and "Bell 202" immediately came to my mind. It crops up carrying Caller ID on landlines in North America, and railway end-of-train devices use it for sending their telemetry over narrowband FM. It's very well-suited for any situation where you want to send short, low-bandwidth bursts of data over an audio channel.

If you need to encode or decode Bell 202 or similar schemes such as V.23, the SpanDSP library [1] is very handy.

[1] [https://github.com/jart/spandsp](https://github.com/jart/spandsp)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is great. I have one of those cheap RTL-SDR units, and it was well worth the $8 to pull in and decode ADS-B signals from overflying aircraft. There's something exciting about obtaining data "over the air" in a way that completely circumvents the Internet.

</comment><comment><USER12> And this is why I'm enjoying the heck out of playing with SDRs.

<comment><USER13> Do you have any suggestions on a good full duplex sdr to start with? The last one I remember wanting was maybe the lime something? ADS-B data is cool, but my main goal was/is to demonstrate use as a bug finder and maybe do some other spectrum fun with my pc accessories and tv, wlan, etc.

<comment><USER12> Depends on how cost sensitive you are. Currently the LimeSDR[1] is the best value (even at $300 and no case) because it is not only full duplex, it also supports MIMO operation. While the latter is intended to support things like 4G LTE it also gives one the ability to do direction finding as multiple receivers clocked by a phase locked LO allows you to do phase analysis of incoming signals.

The Ettus USRP B-series[2] is very well supported for about $1000.

The ADALM-PLUTO[3] at $150 is a bargain for a full duplex SDR but a range of 325 MHz to 3.8GHz leaves a lot of interesting spectrum out. That is less of a problem if you get a mixer and RF signal generator because you can up/down convert the HF/VHF/UHF bands up to 1 GHz as an IF and play with them there. There are some off the shelf solutions for this like the 'Ham it Up'[4] but you are at the mercy of their TXCO.

I have all of these solutions except for the USRP and find that when I reach for a radio to look at a signal I usually grab the LimeSDR.

[1] [https://www.crowdsupply.com/lime- micro/limesdr](https://www.crowdsupply.com/lime-micro/limesdr)

[2] [https://www.ettus.com/product-categories/usrp-bus- series/](https://www.ettus.com/product-categories/usrp-bus-series/)

[3] [https://www.digikey.com/products/en?keywords=PLUTO](https://www.digikey.com/products/en?keywords=PLUTO)

[4] [https://www.nooelec.com/store/sdr/sdr-addons/ham-it- up-304/h...](https://www.nooelec.com/store/sdr/sdr-addons/ham-it-up-304/ham- it-up-plus.html)

<comment><USER14> Any recommendations for softwares to play around with?

I got a NooSDR (€30 ish on amazon). I agree so much that its 1090MHz(?) leaves so much to explore, but I didn't have much luck other than decoding TV/FM/DAB using CubicSDR, GQRX, and VLC.

I am more interested in using it with Python/GNU Radio so didn't bother installing those super cool web based tools yet. Since I'm just starting, I'd like to get a feel of using it with a general purpose "summary software" first. Essentially something that can lookup the frequency databases, etc. to tell me: what is it that I'm looking at; if its LSB/USB/FM, and these sorts of things. Overall, I quite enjoy CubicSDR for this, but I'd appreciate if you have suggestions or resources I could check out. Thanks for the info above!

<comment><USER12> I found gnuradio companion to be useful for just poking around. Assuming the radio has a gnuradio compatible driver then you can do a lot of basic things like tune it around various spectra and get a feel for its sensitivity and selectivity. You can try out lots of different things quickly with it.

Lately I've been looking at front end selectors and their impact on radio performance. I have been using pysignal to process snapshots of iq data from the radio in my test setup.

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the tip, this definitely narrows down problem space to poke around with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm wondering where the raw video from the helicopter came from originally. My guess is that this isn't something you can do with an SDR and hobbyist equipment, but I would love to be proven wrong.

<comment><USER7> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MprHxarmOI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MprHxarmOI)

The footage is direct from the news organisation. I'm guessing this is footage from their FLIR mounted camera, maybe captured streaming to their HQ. Is that what you mean?</comment></comment>


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Platform Confluence - <AUTHOR> https://www.kevin-indig.com/platform-confluence/ <comment><AUTHOR> Aggregation theory describes the shift of power from supply to demand, growth based on zero marginal cost, and direct relationships with users. Platforms like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others were able to become aggregators because of the internet.

The next step in the evolution of aggregators is Platform Confluence: the combination of several apps and sites owned by the same company into an ecosystem in which user signals and ads reinforce each other.</comment>